Originally Posted on The Coaching Tools Company as Beyond Sessions 1: Why Great Coaching Sessions Don’t Guarantee Transformation
| This article was originally published by The Guiding Matrix and is republished on The Coaching Tools Company website with their kind permission. The article was written by Dr Steve Jeffs, and all rights remain with the original author. |
You’ve had powerful sessions that didn’t lead anywhere. And sessions that felt ordinary that somehow changed everything.
As an experienced coach, you’ve felt this pattern. You know how to coach. You create meaningful conversations. Your clients leave sessions with insight, clarity, sometimes even a visible shift. In the moment, the work feels alive and worthwhile.
And then, when you look at the full arc of an engagement, something doesn’t always land.
Some clients integrate deeply. Others stall. Some journeys feel coherent and purposeful; others lose momentum or end without real closure. You can’t always explain why — and the pressure to “make each session count” never quite lifts.
This isn’t a problem with your coaching skill. It’s a problem with where the work has been located.
The Pattern I See in Mentoring
When I’m mentoring coaches, this pattern shows up consistently.
A coach I’m working with will describe sessions that felt powerful in the moment — real insight, engagement, movement. Then, when I ask about the journey as a whole, there’s often a pause.
Not because they haven’t thought about it, but because there wasn’t a designed journey. There were sessions.
Session-by-session delivery has real strengths. It allows for responsiveness, honours client direction, and reduces preparation burden. When coaching is occasional support or skills-focused conversation, it works well. The ceiling appears when coaching is meant to create lasting transformation.
Without a structure that holds the work across time, every session has to generate its own direction, momentum, and meaning. That load doesn’t disappear just because a coach is skilled.
Where the Work Actually Lives
Here’s the distinction at the heart of coaching journey design: sessions don’t create transformation — journeys do.
Transformation rarely happens in a single moment. It unfolds across a sequence. This aligns with research on transformational learning, which shows that meaningful change requires cycles of experience, reflection, and integration over time. Clients need time to orient themselves, to resource their capacity, to understand what they’re really working with before they can work on it. They need space to experiment, to encounter resistance, to integrate change, and eventually to recognise what has shifted.
This happens over weeks, not inside one powerful conversation.
This isn’t a problem with your coaching skill. It’s a problem with where the work has been located. The issue isn’t the quality of the session — it’s that responsibility for transformation has been placed at the level of moments rather than continuity, often without realising what that quietly creates over time.
When there is no clear progression from beginning to completion — when the journey hasn’t been designed — transformation becomes accidental. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn’t. And because there’s no structure holding the work, you have no way to see why.
What Improvisation Actually Costs
Improvisation itself isn’t the problem. Skilled improvisation is essential — it’s how coaching stays responsive, relational, and alive.
But when improvisation becomes the only strategy, the work starts to rely on you carrying the entire engagement in your head. Under that kind of load, improvisation stops being creative capacity and becomes a stress response. And no amount of skill can substitute for a journey that has been intentionally designed. Understanding how structure supports this is the next step.
Who This Is For
This is written for coaches already working with real clients — past wondering if you can coach, but sensing delivery feels heavier than it should. If you’re still building foundational skills or seeking marketing tactics, this isn’t your stage yet.
Where This Leads
If you’re recognising the difference between “good sessions” and “a held journey,” you’re already at the threshold this work addresses. Beyond Sessions is a professional practice space for coaches who want to professionalise how coaching is delivered — not as a script, but as a structure that holds the work. This approach aligns with professional coaching standards that emphasise structured engagement frameworks.
Article 6 explores what actually changes when the journey holds the work.
If you’d like to explore the approach: [Learn more]
